[lbo-talk] A good essay on Christopher Hitchens

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 19:03:35 PDT 2009


Thanks for that SA, it's interesting although I think it takes Hitchens way too seriously. Who are these Platypus people, do you know?

A point about Raymond Williams, since I've just been reading the book-length interview with him, Politics and Letters. It's really unfair of Hitchens to call him or his critique of Orwell 'Stalinist', and the guy writing the article seems to accept Hitchens's take on this.

In fact Williams was not one of those who left the Communist Party after 1956. He left it during WWII, enlisting in the army so as to fight fascism when it was still explicitly against the party line of the time. He did not rejoin after the war, but started the 'Politics and Letters' journal:

"We knew we were to the left of the Labour Party, and we regarded the British Communist Party as irrelevant because of the intellectual errors it had made." [p.66]

"What kept me at a distance from the Party was a certain, I think contempt would not be too strong a word - although it was not a word I would have used then - for the work of the Party. By this style of work I do not mean the isolable elements of my Cambridge experience, or their combination with a certain modishness, but the manipulation and centralism. For example, the CP's pronouncements on Yugoslavia, the only unambiguously self-directed military revolution in Eastern Europe - the hurried charges and then retractions... Although by the time Edward Thompson and I were talking in '58, it was not at all clear which had been the right way to spend the years between '46 and '56, fighting inside the Party or trying to develop a separate position. I would be prepared to say that his was the better choice, but I felt so distant from that style and after all we thought, probably wrongly, that we had a more open style available to us which would nevertheless continue the common project of the thirties." [p. 91]

As for what motivated his criticism of Orwell:

"In the Britain of the fifties, along every road that you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on work or ordinary life, there was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back. Down to the late sixties political editorials in newspapers would regularly admonish youner socialists to read their Orwell and see where all that led to. This seemed to me false. The Orwell history seemed to me more complex and contradictory. Here was a man who said that ever word he had written was for democratic socialism, and who fought for it in Catalonia as a revolutionary, yet so much of whose writing is clearly anti-socialist in a general way and not just on particular questions, and indeed has had an enormous anti-socialist effect." [p. 384 - and the whole chapter pp. 384-92 discusses Orwell]

It seems to me that Williams might be more in tune with the Platypus project than Orwell.

Cheers, Mike Beggs scandalum.wordpress.com

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 5:24 AM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://platypus1917.org/2009/03/15/going-it-alone-christopher-hitchens-and-the-death-of-the-left/
>
> SA
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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